Of the two dimensions of rule identified in Chapter 1, the structuring of both public political activity and the way the regime operates internally, the former is dependent upon the latter. If the regime can ensure that the machinery of administration works effectively and is at the command of central decision makers, the capacity for controlling public activity will be enhanced. So too will the stability of the regime because a smoothly functioning bureaucratic structure should ensure better policy outcomes and fewer occasions of domestic conflict. Following a discussion of strategies for building a responsive administrative structure, this chapter focuses on how successive presidential administrations have sought to build a centralized and responsive administrative machine in Russia.

The development of effective institutional machinery of government and administration is not an easy task, especially when a regime inherits that machinery from a former regime, as was the case in Russia. In attempting to establish control, to create a system that is responsive to central decision makers, two essential strategies were evident in post-Soviet Russia: a reliance upon building networks of personal loyalty, and a dependence on organizational means. In principle, these two strategies generate different sorts of imperatives that result in different sorts of regimes.

A reliance upon personal loyalty creates a personalist regime in which the dominant political actor is the individual leader. Of course no leader can rule without an institutional structure supporting him/her. Even when popular commitment is charismatic in nature (see below), the stability of rule requires an administrative machine. This may take the form of a party, but military rule can also be characterized by the dominant figure of an individual personality. In some cases of personalist rule, such a formal structure as a party or military is replaced by the leader's more informal personal clique, which assumes leading positions in the power structure. But although personalist rule requires some form of machinery to stand upon, its claims for authority are very different from those of such a machine. In a personalist regime, the basis of the leader's authority is that leader himself, including the message he represents, rather than organizational considerations like position or rank. His dominance stems not from any office he holds but from his very person and the promise that he embodies.